Hands-On: <cite>Banjo-Kazooie Nuts & Bolts</cite>

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Hands-On: <cite>Banjo-Kazooie Nuts & Bolts</cite>

As far as first things in a presentation of a new game go, happily exclaiming that the main character has lost almost all his moves since the previous version isn't exactly a common one.

And yet, that's exactly how I felt when I played Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, an upcoming Xbox 360 title that Microsoft announced today.

It's a bait-and-switch. In their effort to – in their own words – try and "evolve the platformer," Rare have moved his abilities to external proxies. Or,to use a less high-falutin' term: Parts. That is, parts of vehicles, which Banjo collects and then assembles. So, to choose a hypothetical example, if Banjo wanted to get across an ocean, he could add some floats to the side of a car and trundle across. Or maybe some jets and wings. Or balloons to lift the thing. Or even go the other way, and add ballast to create a submarine.

It's not just simply adding objects to pre-defined chassis to create the desired effect, although the game does have some pre-built ones for you to add on to if you like. Every block can be placed individually including all the superstructure, and then the game's physics goes to work and, voila, a vehicle.

But the screenshots are only going to tell part of the story. This is a complete Lego experience, and you can keep on clicking those blocks together. During the demo, a towering statue of Mario, which one of the testers made, was shown off – and you can apparently drive it, though we're just treated to seeing his head cheekily blown off to demonstrate how the vehicles are made of individual objects.

This is only the start. A tester tells me about that during an internal competition to see what was possible, he constructed a functioning space shuttle, complete with ejectable boosters. When they were sent spinning into the ether, a pair of wings slid into place, allowing you to fly the titan.

Such showiness is only part of it. In the actual game, it's the more functional tweaking where the game goes to town. While it's possible to pass the game's challenges with only the standard selections of machines that you can call up, to get higher ratings you'll have to become a mechanic. And a sneaky one.

A long-jump event is presented, where you simply have to hurtle down a ramp. The machine's power is then cut, and it's a test of how far you can make it roll. First, a vehicle covered with rocket-thrusters takes the mark, a seemingly ideal machine for the task. It rockets forth and gets a decent enough score. The next contender seems unassuming, with only a fraction of the obvious thrusters... but as it takes to the air, its secret is revealed. The whole chassis is ejected away, revealing a much smaller sphere which speeds through the air without the enormous mass, before rolling ever-onwards after hitting the ground.

Almost everything else about this game pales beside this innovation. Yes, Nuts & Bolts is a technical heavyweight: Rare stresses that the hub-city is the single largest game asset they've ever constructed by far. But the vehicle building eclipses anything else they could say. It's such an enormous, game-shifting change that the whole thing will clearly stand or fall on its strength or weakness.

And actually getting hands on with the thing, it doesn't just stand. It seems it flies.

Before I played it, there was the nagging doubt that the actual process of stopping and tweaking a machine would lead to a disjointed feeling. But the actual process of constructing something proves both accessible and enthralling.

Before being thrown into a multiplayer game (and, yes, all this works in a multiplayer environment, which may make Banjo gaming's closest equivalent to Robot Wars) I set about making an enormous monster-truck wheeled beast. It starts as a bicycle, but proves somewhat unstable. It becomes an odd three-at-back-one-at-front bike. Then another two wheels at the front. And a small one at the back. And about six rocket launchers, which when I initially fired in an early version, pretty much flipped the contraption.

As the race kicks off, I'm left with a glorious twisted mad-machine that can barely move, let alone compete. And I'm laughing very hard indeed at my obvious over-reaching ambition and the unalloyed joy of creation. An aborted creation, admittedly, but still joy.

Clearly, much could still go wrong with something so new: Multiplayer balancing, performance, accessibility... but when failing is as much fun as winning in most other games, you suspect they may be on to something.